Dr. Stanley J. Osher

Stan Osher received his MS and PhD (1966) from the Courant Institute, NYU. After working at Brookhaven National Laboratory, UC Berkeley and SUNY Stony Brook, he has been at UCLA since 1976. He is Director of Special Projects at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. Dr. Osher is the coinventor of i) level set methods for computing moving fronts (180,000 references on GOOGLE), ii) ENO, WENO and other numerical methods for computing solutions to hyperbolic conservation laws and Hamilton-Jacobi equations, iii) total variation and other PDE-based image processing techniques. He has been a Fulbright and Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, received the NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award, Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers Computational Mechanics Award, was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, received the SIAM Pioneer Prize at the last ICIAM conference, the SIAM Kleinman Prize at the last SIAM national meeting and was just (May, 2005) elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. He has cofounded 3 successful companies, based, in part, on his own research. His work has been written up numerous times in the scientific and international media, e.g., Science News, Die Zeit. He is a highly cited researcher, according to web-of-science and is the Associate Editor of a number of major journals.

Bregman Iteration, Inverse Scale Space, Cartoon/Texture Decomposition, Recovery of Signal from "Noise" and Other New Techniques in PDE-based Image Restoration.

In recent years there has been an explosion of activity related to PDE- and variational-based methods in image processing. In this talk we will begin with standard BV/L2 minimization and discuss various related and significant improvements, largely provoked by Yves Meyer's 2001 monograph.

A graduate level talk.

Mathematics in the Real World and the Fake World

A new approach to image science and free boundary problems in nature is exemplified by the level set method for capturing moving fronts, which was introduced in 1987 by Osher and Sethian. It has proven to be phenomenally successful as a numerical device. For example, typing in "Level Set Methods" on GOOGLE's search engine gives roughly 170,000 responses. Applications range from capturing multiphase fluid dynamical flows, to special effects in Hollywood to visualization, image processing, control, epitaxial growth, computer vision and many more. In this talk we shall give a quick overview of the numerical technology, its relation with the field of PDE-based imaging science and some application. The real world is exemplified by image analysis and the fake world is exemplified by computer graphics.